Origins of DOS

I'm always surprised, during these nostalgia-fests, that nobody (but me) brings up the origin of the DOS filesystem. IIRC (from a MSFT publication), Patterson used the "Disk Basic" filesystem, originally designed, and possibly coded, by BillG himself, instead of the CP/M filesystem. The Mac, again IIRC, also used a scheme similar to FAT, with every file a linked-list of blocks. CP/M used what would today be called an "extent based" system, which can require a bit more work on write, but usually leads to less fragmentation and faster reads.

Anyway, the very early MSFT/QDOS connection is, to me, more interesting than the notion the BillG was just wandering down the street and stumbled across the source of much of his fortune. :-)